Recently published climate research by Zunli Lu, a geochemist in the Department of Earth Sciences in Syracuse University’s College of Arts and Sciences, has gone viral across the Internet by bloggers. A number of media outlets, including theDaily Mail and The Register, which are published in the United Kingdom, claim this research supports arguments that human-induced global warming is a myth. The claims, Lu says, misrepresent his work and the conclusions in the study. The statement below is an effort to set the record straight. The original news story about the research is posted on Arts and Sciences News.

Zunli Lu:
“It is unfortunate that my research, “An ikaite record of late Holocene climate at the Antarctic Peninsula,” recently published in Earth and Planetary Science Letters, has been misrepresented by a number of media outlets.

Several of these media articles assert that our study claims the entire Earth heated up during medieval times without human CO2 emissions. We clearly state in our paper that we studied one site at the Antarctic Peninsula. The results should not be extrapolated to make assumptions about climate conditions across the entire globe. Other statements, such as the study “throws doubt on orthodoxies around global warming,” completely misrepresent our conclusions. Our study does not question the well-established anthropogenic warming trend.”

Fake Science, Deliberate Distortions for Tea Party Yokels

In one of the clearest demonstrations in memory of the gullible and credulous nature of the the pathetic yokels that frequent such sites as Wattsupwiththat and Climatedepot, this obviously distorted meme was picked up and broadcast uncritically (remarkable, considering the source) around the world.

If you are going to write about fiendishly difficult and involved matters of science and technology, it is not necessary to be an actual scientist, although that helps. What IS necessary is to scrupulously refer back to real science, real scientists, and primary sources. I’ve built the reputation of this blog and this video series on that premise, and that is my commitment to my readers.

Climate Crocks eviscerated a similarly bogus meme some time ago in a video entitled “Birth of a Climate Crock”. Watch that and compare to see how the technique works, and who the players are.

[…] Of course, one would not be taking into account the monumental capacity for some journalists and the outlets they work for to make up stories whenever it suits them. But all of the kerfuffle over the Mail story and the […]